Teacher, We Want to Paint!

I had one foot on the ladder and a brush clenched between my teeth when Tessa Reed slapped a stack of printed flyers onto my worktable. "Look," she said. "I got a client." I took the brush out of my mouth. The wall behind me was half-painted, a blue heron taking shape over the cracked plaster in the back room of my studio. "You got a client for what?" "For a mural. A real one. Paid." She tapped the top flyer with one red-painted fingernail. "The owner of the Harborlight Café wants this design on the outside wall." The design on the flyer showed a row of marsh grasses beneath a wide, pale moon. The brushwork looked familiar. I climbed down far enough to see it clearly. It was mine. Not exactly. I had drawn the first version three weeks earlier as a demonstration, then invited Tessa and June Bell to add their own marks. We'd used one sheet of letter-size paper, taped to the big table, and painted over one another's strokes until the marsh stopped looking like a lesson and started looking like a place. The moon was June's. The grasses were mostly mine. Tessa had added a flock of black birds that cut across the sky like thrown stones. The flyer had cropped the birds out. At the bottom, in small print, it read: Original design by Tessa Reed. I glanced at the door. June stood near the sink with a rag in her hands. She had seen it too. Her face gave me nothing I could name. "Tessa," I said, "where did you get this image?" She lifted her chin. "I painted it." "We painted it." "You showed us how to make a composition. That's what lessons are." "That's not what this was." "Then you should've said so." She leaned her hip against my table. "I can't pay rent with practice pieces." Tessa was twenty-four, old enough to know what a contract meant and young enough, I sometimes thought, to mistake confidence for permission. She had a talent for color and an instinct for the image that caught a stranger's eye. She also had a way of speaking as if every hesitation from someone else were an attempt to keep her small. "I'm not asking you to work for free," I said. "I'm asking you not to sell work we made together as if you made it alone." "Then let me repaint it. I can change enough." "Changing it doesn't make the first version yours." June folded the rag in half. "The café has already seen it?" Tessa looked at her. "I sent the owner a preview." "How long ago?" I asked. "Yesterday." The café's owner, Owen Pike, had hired me twice before. The second job had gone badly when a subcontractor painted over a protected brick panel without checking the building agreement. Owen had paid for the repair, but he'd made it clear he didn't want surprises on a wall again. "Did you tell him I had anything to do with it?" "I didn't use your name." "That wasn't my question." Tessa gathered the flyers into a neat stack. "He asked for a quote. I gave him one." My phone buzzed on the table. Owen's name lit the screen. I picked it up and answered before Tessa could say anything else. "Is Tessa working with you on this?" he asked. I looked at her. "She's my student. We made the image in the studio as a shared exercise. I haven't agreed to a commission." The silence on the line lasted long enough to become an answer of its own. "I need the exterior painted by the end of next month," Owen said. "I can't sort out ownership after I've hired someone. Send me a clean proposal by Friday, or I'll call the next artist." "I understand." When I hung up, Tessa's jaw was tight. "You just killed it," she said. "I told him the truth." "Maybe I'm tired of being your student." "That's your choice. But you still have to be honest about the work." "Easy for you to say. Your name is on the door." She grabbed her jacket from the chair. At the doorway, she paused. "I wanted you to be proud of me." For a second, my answer stayed behind my teeth with the taste of paint. "I would've been," I said. "If you'd brought me the truth." She left without taking the flyers. June waited until the door shut. "Do you want me to say something?" "No." I looked at the unfinished heron, then at the cropped-out birds on the flyer. "I want you to tell me what you think." June glanced toward the door. "I think she wants the work to be hers because she needs to believe she can make a living. I also think she knows what she did." It was more than I'd expected from the quiet one. I turned back to the wall. The heron's wing was still unfinished. "What do you want?" I asked. June looked down at the rag in her hands. "I want to paint."